4 Skills to Help You Communicate With More Emotional Maturity in Your Relationships
A marriage and family therapist shares her best kept secrets from her experience working with couples.
6 min readDec 28, 2023
As a marriage and family therapist, I get to see the inner workings of people’s relationships day-in and day-out. When couples come to see me, their most common complaint is something along the lines of “we have communication issues.”
Over the years, however, I’ve come to realize that people don’t really have communication issues; they have emotional maturity issues. These emotional maturity issues lead to all sorts of dysfunctional relational dynamics, including and especially the way they navigate difficult conversations.
So, in my work with my clients, it often looks like what I’m doing is helping them “communicate better.” But what I’m really doing is helping them develop more emotional maturity in their communication by:
- Taking more personal responsibility for what they feel.
- Speaking their truth of the moment, even when it’s scary to do so.
- Learning to really hear and receive the truth from their partner without reacting from fear.
- Allowing themselves to
